Sunday, October 26, 2008

When I first downloaded picasa 3.0, and looked at the new features, I must admit I thought the picasa photo viewer was a pretty nifty, fast and easy and it "transparently" overlayed the view of the image over the working window, rather than opening yet another window frame. It also creates and iphoto style film strip under the image and it gives you access to a number of picasa actions like zooming in uploading to the web & emailing without having to fire up picasa.

Well I've come to the conclusion I'd rather fire up picasa to do things with my photos and just want explorer to handle images as before. Now the pesky problem of how to restore the default viewer for all those graphic file types. It turned out to easy. Under tools menu in Picasa select the item Configure Photo Viewer an you will see the dialogue (show on the left), and tick the don't use Picasa Photo Viewer line and it will not appear and you will be back to your previous setting. If I change my mind I just have to visit tools/configure photo viewer again and change my selection

Friday, October 24, 2008

I often set my camera to multi-shot mode (on most digital cameras this is the setting marked with the three open overlapping squares, and may be called continuous mode or burst mode) when I notice I have the opportunity to capture birds in flight. This gull was some distance away and with no time to change to my long lens he ended up tiny. To complicate things his flight path meant I was pointing directly at the sun, but luckily I had my polarizing filter in place to avoid a total wash out

Still the individual images were interesting, both in composition and colour and I figured it would be worthwhile seeing what autostitch could make of the set (see also capturing the glide). To my surprise it created a decent image, a time lapse style capture. Instead of nude descending the stairs it is gull into the sunset. The slight halo effect appears to be an artifact of the splicing process by I think it adds to the image.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

I have been photographing the interesting patterns of life, shell trails, as below, crab balls and diggings, footprints, etc on the sand for some time. I don’t don’t how to read their hidden message, when the next tide is, or is the swell dropping, or is a big flood likely, or is it just dinner time. Or is there even a message there at all?

I am finally succumbing to watermarks on my images uploaded to the net. I know a lot of folk hate them but there is just so much open theft and disregard of the rights of those posting on the net. I once championed the idea of the creative commons system that was adopted on flickr. Now I see the same images reposted so often I’m saddened. The copyright doesn’t mean I wont give permission to use and repost my work, but please write to me first. There are lots of utilities to add watermarks to your photos, many free and it is a common feature in photo mangers. I’m using the new feature to add a watermark included at the bottom of the file export in Picasa 3.0. It is simple and unobtrusive.

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